12 Top Big Data Analytics Players

When data grows into the tens or even hundreds of terabytes, you need a special technology to quickly make sense of it all. From Hadoop to Teradata, check out the top platform options.

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ParAccel Combines Column-Store, MPP And In-Database AnalyticsParAccel is the developer of the ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB), a database that combines the fast, selective-querying and compression advantages of a column-store database with the scale-out capabilities of massively parallel processing. The vendor says its platform supports a range of analyses, from reporting to complex advanced-analytics workloads. Built-in analytics enable analysts to perform advanced mathematical, statistical, and data-mining functions, and an open API extends in-database processing capabilities to third-party analytic applications. Table functions are used to feed and receive results to and from third-party and custom algorithms written in languages such as C and C++. ParAccel has partnered with Fuzzy Logix, a vendor that offers an extensive library of descriptive statistics, Monte Carlo simulations and pattern-recognition functions. The table functions approach also supports MapReduce techniques and more than 700 analyses commonly used by financial services.

If there's one vendor I could add after the fact, it would be Actian (formerly Ingres). The Ingres database figures in data warehousing, but this company it pursuing high-scale analytics with its newer Vectorwise database. Gartner ranks it as a challenger and the customer ranks are growing. I hope to follow up soon with a customer case example. Also check the TCP-H rankings, as Actian says they've blown the doors off previous records. -- Doug Henschen

Analytic's software is so important nowadays - data typically doubles every 18 months and with real-time information being requested at all times it doesn't surprise me how competitive the environment is, and thankfully there is some great software out there.